In my experience, if the DM tries to push the players into playing the game "their (DM) say", at some point the PC's will tune out and/or revolt - if not open revolt, passive aggressive will quickly set in and no-one is happy. I've personally played in a game where the DM did heaps of work trying to set things up the way he wanted, before we even started he struggled against the kinds of PC s we wanted to play (he saw our use of the 3.5 rules as too over-powered), and in the end the huge campaign he'd planned and worked on lasted exactly one session before it folded simply because it felt like everything we wanted to do as fun and interesting he didn't like, and everything he wanted to restrict and/or add that he thought was more realistic and more 'fun' we hated.
So I'd recommend that you try and find a "win win" solution - let them play their crazy PC's, but make them help work out how they can be the heroes in what they should all know will end up being some kind of "PC's vs Giants" campaign. Don't take on heaps of extra work, let the players take on their share.
Personally I don't like much from Chapter 1, so I've replaced most of it with other (older) published material, to get them to level 5 and to spin some better plot hooks for the PC's. But that's a lot more work - for me, working on helping to make better plot points is the part I like the most. I still kept the beginning part, where the PC's rescue the village from the goblins - goblins is very much a cliche opening for first level PC's, but if your PC's are 'monster' races, including a goblin PC, well it could be quite interesting, yeah - how will the players cast themselves as the heroes?
What are the PC's backgrounds, do they have any ideas on back-story? They need to be more than just a stat-block, they need background, flaws etc. Make sure every PC has something in each of these categories, then between you it's pretty easy to flesh it out and give your campaign a lot of interesting possibilities for plot-hooks, etc.
Personally I take each PC's background, and any ideas they have on back-story (at most, I get a small paragraph, which is ample), then I re-work the back-story a little to add direct tie-ins to the campaign, especially the initial plots. For example, in my game one PC (a Dwarf) is the son of the tavern owner, and his back-story helped me invent a daughter for Lady Nandar (a future plot complication); another (a human noble) is Lady Nandar's nephew whose travel from Waterdeep lead me to add a personal escort for him (background NPC's, who looked after the town after the PC's left).
In your game, I feel you could keep Chapter 1 as written, if you are happy with it. Does the goblin PC know the goblins that have camped out in Nightstone, e.g. did they fall out about something recently and hold grudges? Same for the other PC's - how do they know each other, and what reasons can you try and help with, that could explain why they save a human village from goblins etc, and so on... As DM, you know what lies ahead, so help the players out by adding some plot-hooks and potential for motivations and role-play directly into their back-stories - a paragraph or two is enough. If you have really good players, they can create a lot of their motivations on the fly; if they are simply playing a 'monster' as if it was a 'hero', role-play as many NPCs as you can to set an example for the players to follow, e.g. a villager yells, "hey, one of the goblins has gone rogue, and is killing the others; hey look, it's got back-up from some other monsters - what the heck?"
So I'd recommend that you try and find a "win win" solution - let them play their crazy PC's, but make them help work out how they can be the heroes in what they should all know will end up being some kind of "PC's vs Giants" campaign. Don't take on heaps of extra work, let the players take on their share.
Personally I don't like much from Chapter 1, so I've replaced most of it with other (older) published material, to get them to level 5 and to spin some better plot hooks for the PC's. But that's a lot more work - for me, working on helping to make better plot points is the part I like the most. I still kept the beginning part, where the PC's rescue the village from the goblins - goblins is very much a cliche opening for first level PC's, but if your PC's are 'monster' races, including a goblin PC, well it could be quite interesting, yeah - how will the players cast themselves as the heroes?
What are the PC's backgrounds, do they have any ideas on back-story? They need to be more than just a stat-block, they need background, flaws etc. Make sure every PC has something in each of these categories, then between you it's pretty easy to flesh it out and give your campaign a lot of interesting possibilities for plot-hooks, etc.
Personally I take each PC's background, and any ideas they have on back-story (at most, I get a small paragraph, which is ample), then I re-work the back-story a little to add direct tie-ins to the campaign, especially the initial plots. For example, in my game one PC (a Dwarf) is the son of the tavern owner, and his back-story helped me invent a daughter for Lady Nandar (a future plot complication); another (a human noble) is Lady Nandar's nephew whose travel from Waterdeep lead me to add a personal escort for him (background NPC's, who looked after the town after the PC's left).
In your game, I feel you could keep Chapter 1 as written, if you are happy with it. Does the goblin PC know the goblins that have camped out in Nightstone, e.g. did they fall out about something recently and hold grudges? Same for the other PC's - how do they know each other, and what reasons can you try and help with, that could explain why they save a human village from goblins etc, and so on... As DM, you know what lies ahead, so help the players out by adding some plot-hooks and potential for motivations and role-play directly into their back-stories - a paragraph or two is enough. If you have really good players, they can create a lot of their motivations on the fly; if they are simply playing a 'monster' as if it was a 'hero', role-play as many NPCs as you can to set an example for the players to follow, e.g. a villager yells, "hey, one of the goblins has gone rogue, and is killing the others; hey look, it's got back-up from some other monsters - what the heck?"
